Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

ianvisits.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 98 posts

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#81

Post by sophacles »

cardanome wrote: post #73
legitster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While cities were smaller, I think people forget the inverse, which is that rural areas were much more densely populated. The farms were very small, required lots of labor, and were always close to the manor of a lord or parish. Which almost invariably had a bakery, brewery, and a well present. These services were very convenient to the average peasant, and I was surprised to learn how few medieval homes even had a h…

Having access to fresh water is not the same as saying any puddle of water was 100% safe. You bring up traveling when the vast majority of people did not travel. At all. Maybe to the next market if we talk later medieval period but that was it really. (I do use bottled water when traveling because I am only used to the local bacteria and it is easy to get sick at first when going to a new country.) As you write most…

> The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well.

Not really. Independent of people drinking directly from the well:

* animals are watered by getting the water from the well.

* food is prepared with water from the well

* ale is prepared with water from the well

and so on. All of these things would subsequently be poisoned if the well was poisoned. They needed a safe source of water, but that does not imply that they drank it directly.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#82

Post by legitster »

nevinera wrote: post #71

These types of posts are .. well thought-out, and usually posted by someone with relevant education. But they are not reviewed documents or journal articles, and you can _tell_ when someone is mixing in a lot of their own educated guessing with the research they've done. Which is the case here. He probably wasn't intending it to be taken as authoritative source, but that's how most people will _read_ something like t…

The author is presenting a plausible enough theory without any evidence that it is actually more accurate than the actual historical texts.

As one example, the author goes on and on about the importance of the conduits into London - but here's how actual documents from the time describe them:

"A certain conduit was built in the midst of the City of London, so that the rich and middling persons therein might there have water for preparing their food, and the poor for their drink"

Kind of an important bit of context to leave out!

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#83

Post by hprotagonist »

legitster wrote: post #63
cardanome wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks. The vast majority of people in the medieval period did NOT live in cities. Furthermore the cities that did exists where way less densely populated and would more look like bigger villages to the modern eye. It is the modern world with it's industrialization and high population density that has the problem of getting safe…

While cities were smaller, I think people forget the inverse, which is that rural areas were much more densely populated. The farms were very small, required lots of labor, and were always close to the manor of a lord or parish. Which almost invariably had a bakery, brewery, and a well present. These services were very convenient to the average peasant, and I was surprised to learn how few medieval homes even had a h…

> Roman troops would make and haul the stuff around with them rather than risk local water on the march.

it’s more than this: posca or sekanjibin or switchel or any of the other similar vinegar drinks are a bit like savory gatorade: you will preferentially choose them when exerted and they’re available, they’re better regardless of sanitation.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#84

Post by dmoy »

resolutebat wrote: post #11
hnlmorg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re comparing England from ~800 years ago to modern day countries. That hardly seems fair. There’s a lot of knowledge we take for granted that simply hadn’t been discovered yet in medieval times.

What, boiling water? The Chinese have been drinking tea for thousands of years.

Yea but for routine consumption, drinking exclusively hot (boiled previously) water wasn't as much of a thing, especially in Northern China, prior to like mid 1800s.

It was after a particular outbreak (cholera?) somewhere in the 19th century that hit northern China way worse than southern China that they figured out the major difference was the hot water habits in the South. Even in the 1930s there was still a push to increase boiled water usage.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#85

Post by riffraff »

legitster wrote: post #3

I feel like some of these debunkings need debunking! I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today. The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink. And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as p…

> medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink

what did they need to understand? At various points in history people thought it was a good idea to drink mercury or use dung to cure toothache.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#86

Post by throwway120385 »

legitster wrote: post #65
card_zero wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just shoehorning in the assumption that people had diarrhea a lot, because that's the trope about medieval Europe. But if everybody lives in a well-established traditional way (and there's no current war or plague in the area) then they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water. In Georgian times, around 1800, coal-based industry gets under way, there's a population expl…

> they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water I once drank water from a mountain stream and spent a week sick from some sort of phage associated with beavers. As any avid hiker can tell you, even crystal clear, pristine surface waters still run the risk of making you sick. Even without the need of human intervention. Almost every human culture has some traditional drink that…

Giardiasis is often referred to as the "beaver fever" because the organism completes part of its lifecycle in mammals and beavers crap wherever they eat, which is in the water.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#87

Post by insane_dreamer »

hnlmorg wrote: post #15
refactor_master wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But humans have been cooking stuff for thousands and thousands of years to improve nutritional value and kill off bacteria. Why would water be an exception?

Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now). There are a plethora of other reasons food might have been cooked, not least of all being flavour. The fact that it also killed bacteria would have been an accidental benefit. Also a lot of food actually loses nutrients when cooked.

Ancient cultures relied on observation-based trial-and-error knowledge passed down from generation to generation, mostly involving people dying. They didn't have to understand the causes in order to be correct about the effect. E.g., if you eat raw meat that's been sitting there a while, you get sick and might die. How do we know? Because X and Y people died after eating it. But if you cook it, you don't get sick and don't die. How do we know, because A and B people cooked it and didn't die. Thus -> cook meat. Why? Who knows what unscientific reasons they would give (likely superstitious ones). But "discoveries" of this sort were passed down, in the same way that they discovered which mushrooms not to eat (by people dying when they ate them).

Same applied to which local sources of water were safe to drink (i.e., people didn't die when they drank from there), and whether fermented drink (i.e., beer) was safer than water.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#88

Post by pessimizer »

legitster wrote: post #3

I feel like some of these debunkings need debunking! I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today. The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink. And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as p…

> And it makes plenty of reason that brewers would be incentivised to keep ABV low so people could drink it all day if they could.

Still true in modern times. I'm not even sure it's possible to get drunk on Bud Light. Light rice beers have always been clearly intended to be drunk all day. I worked at a convenience store in a trashy neighborhood in the 90s, and the same people who had just bought a case a few hours ago would come back in for the next case, dead sober.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#89

Post by snowpid »

namaria wrote: post #21

I don't understand this type if historiography where "medieval" is an adjective used as if it refers to a very well defined time and place. Anything medieval can refer to up to a thousand years of history and several dozen polities.

yes i does say lots about the audience where we discuss mostly England as an example.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#90

Post by schmidt_fifty »

pjlegato wrote: post #74
doingtheiroming wrote: post #35

There’s a line in one of the Aubury Maturin books, Clarissa Oaks when pumping the ship bilges, a sailor remarks, “she flows as clear and sweet as Hobson’s conduit”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_Conduit Fresh water was consumed in prodigious quantities in the Royal Navy, not least for watering down grog but also for extracting the salt from salted meats.

Other way around -- grog wasn't so much diluted with water as the grog was applied TO the fresh water as an antiseptic. Fresh water on ships had typically been sealed inside a barrel for months or even years before it was consumed, growing all manner of unhealthy pathogens. Pre-germ theory people read this as "it smells and tastes bad," which is a pretty good first-order approximation of germ theory. When you cut tha…

[dead]
Post reply on HN